Internet Spam... A $992 Million Dollar Market

Yes, it is true, there are more spam emails sent daily than there are internet users... how crummy is that?!?

According to Spam Filter Review (http://www.spam-filter-reviews.com/) there are 12.4 Billion spam emails sent every day...

According to Internet World Stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com/) there are 1,133,408,294 internet users worldwide...


That means that on average we receive around 10 spam emails daily. I don't know about you, but that is way too much for me and frankly I'm tired of it.

While you may think that spam is easily identifiable and worthless, surprisingly 28% of those that receive spam end up replying to it, and around 8% actually purchase from spam email.

If we calculate how much spam emails generate in revenue, assuming that the average purchase is around $20 spent on a product a spam email advertises, we find that the spam generates around $992,000,000 in sales. Whats sad, is that that number will presumably continue to grow as long as the internet continues to grow and people continue to give into this tom-foolery.

There are a couple of ways we could battle this issue:

• We could write and complain to our email service provider
• We could reply back to spammer email accounts in large numbers in an effort to disable that users account
• We could mark each and every spam email as spam
• We could just ignore it and let email providers deal with it

Or... we could engage in spamucation - educate ourselves so that we learn how to identify internet spam in an effort to choke the $992 million made off of spam emails every year.

Lets think about it, which solution do you think will be the most beneficial? Keep in mind that in order for it to be the most beneficial we should not only think about ourselves, but also the email providers we currently have email accounts with. If we choose the wrong solution, we could end up hurting our email providers and loosing whatever quality of service (some are good, some bad) we had available.